My olive oil cupcakes were made with lemon and thyme. They were dense and crumbly, yet plenty moist and tasted like a lemon pound cake without the pound of butter. The fresh thyme gave them an even more Springy feel and the balsamic whipped cream blew me away! I could eat that stuff on anything!

How Did I End Up Making the Olive Oil Cupcakes with Lemon and Thyme?

Rachel of Coconut and Lime and I have again and again blogged about things at the same “thyme”:

I am very lucky that Rachel didn’t brand me a copycat. I wasn’t copying – really, honestly, truly I wasn’t. I hadn’t even read her posts yet when I made any of my cupcakes. The thyming was just eerie.

Rachel and I talked about it and decided that since we clearly like the same kinds of things and it was bound to happen anyway, we should plan to post something at the same thyme. Since the whole thing was about thyming, we decided to both make cupcakes with thyme! (Fine, we didn’t know what to bake and Rachel suggested an herb and we ended up with thyme. I like my made- up version better though.)

Shopping for Ingredients

I knew I wanted to use fresh thyme. I opted to buy a thyme plant so that I could use what I needed and plant the rest. Jonathan and I also bought some tomato plants. Not surprisingly, I got a twitter from Rachel saying that she had bought some tomatoes to plant the same day. That one wasn’t so weird, but still, I’m going to have to meet her some day. We are living parallel lives.

The most fun part of my ingredient shopping, however, was for olive oil. A new olive oil store, Extra Virgin, opened near us in Clayton, Missouri. At Extra Virgin, you can do olive oil tastings just like you would do wine tastings. The variety in olive oils is astounding. The owner was incredibly helpful and recommended an olive oil that is perfect for baking – Jovia Groves’ 2007 Arbequina. Apparently she isn’t the only fan of this olive oil. Read the review of it from the blog “I Love Olive Oil”.

You can bake with any olive oil, however the oils vary greatly in the pungency and strength of the olive flavor. The Jovia tasted really buttery and had only a mild olive flavor. When the cupcakes were baked, you would never know that I had made them with olive oil. The owner told me that she uses olive oil as her vegetable oil in any recipe that calls for vegetable oil. I never would have thought to do that.

The Olive Oil Cupcake Recipe

I got the recipe for the olive oil cupcakes by slightly modifying an olive oil cake recipe from Cafe Fernando. The recipe with my modifications is listed below, but be sure to check out the original recipe on Cafe Fernando as well. He’s got a great pic of a slice of the cake that will give you a good idea of what the texture is like.

The Balsamic Vinegar Whipped Cream Recipe

I’ve always said that I don’t like whipped cream. What I meant was that I don’t like Ready Whip. I love spraying the whipped cream from that pressurized container as much as the next gal, but the taste just isn’t there. Fresh whipped cream is so easy to make and is in such a different league that I have no idea why everyone doesn’t make it.
I was going to make a lemon whipped cream for this recipe. When I tasted the cupcake and realized just how lemony it was, I knew that more lemon would be too much. I found a recipe for balsamic whipped cream on Sugarlaws and thought it would be a perfect complement to the cupcakes.
At first, I was a balsamic doubter. I actually poured some balsamic vinegar onto some extra cupcake batter to see how the flavors went together. It was perfect! I’ve reprinted Sugarlaws’ recipe below. She served her balsamic whipped cream with strawberries, which is exactly what I plan to do with all the whipped cream I have left over.

A Present for Making it to the End

I leave you with this photo from J. Pollack Photography. I have to link to him in almost every post. He’s my husband and he makes my cupcakes look so good!
Don’t forget to go check out Rachel’s thyme cupcakes at Coconut and Lime!

And until I found strawberries I was totally going to make lemon-thyme cupcakes. Then I was going to make strawberry balsamic frosting to go with the strawberry thyme cupcakes but then went with the lemon-thyme frosting instead.

Alanna – The icing color didn’t bother me. Since balsamic is typically brownish, I like the muddy color. However, I do agree that it would look really nice with white balsamic as well. I like that idea!

Thanks for referencing my review of Jovia here! It truly is one of the best California olive oils that I’ve reviewed thus far for my blog. My wife and I now regularly use olive oil in our baking of sweets. We’ll substitute it for butter in brownies and cakes constantly. sometimes, we’ll go half olive oil/half butter.

One of our favorite things to do is use an orange-infused olive oil (bet u could find one at the Extra Virgin store in Clayton) to make pumpkin bread/cupcakes. they really turn out amazingly fluffy, slightly tangy-citrusy, and crazy delicious.

anyway, if you can come up with a unique pumpkin cupcake/orange olive oil recipe, i’d love to feature it. i’m not a recipe guy — i just write about good (and sometimes bad) olive oil. cheers!

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Yes, that is definitely a good looking cupcake. I love your flavor combination. The addition of the balsamic vinegar sounds really interesting. I hope you don’t mind if I borrow it for my blog. It is just too perfect!

Update: I made them! I should tell you I’ve never made cupcakes from scratch before except the “easy” recipe in the betty crocker cookbook, which I attempted last night and which ended up stuck to the liners and pan.

Today I set out to make this, using thyme from my garden (I am both a novice gardener and a novice cook) and organic lemons left over from a fast I did last week.

The only problem with the recipe was that there were not enough cupcakes to go around! People were skeptical when I said the name out loud but they went over really well. If I had more lemons right now, I’d be in the kitchen making more.

I am embarrassed to admit that I had no concept of how GOOD cupcakes could be.

Can’t wait to try these. I’ve been using olive oil as a substitute for other oils for quite some time now. I very rarely use other oils, so it’s typically what I have on hand – it works really, really well.

These look good–an olive oil CAKE recipe is rare, but I was wondering: can I exclude the lemon juice and keep the moistness? I’m really looking for a moist cake, but I’m not wanting a lemon flavor right now…

Hi Stef,Love to see ur posting after browsing for oil cupcake. Can I ask u something? Would it be different if I whisk the eggs and sugar, then add in the oil instead whisk oil and sugar, then add in the eggs as u did? Because some says that if whisk eggs first then the oil makes the cake less greasy. Please help. Thanks a lot!

Thanks so much for sharing your recipe! I love the flavor of the lemon and the thyme in these. So good! I didn’t love the texture the olive oil gave the cupcake and gotta say I made the the balsamic whipped cream twice — first time with 3 tbsp of the vinegar and 2nd time with just 1 tbsp. The flavors of the lemon and the balsamic vinegar just didn’t work for me — I think it was just way too much acidity between the two. I am going to try remaking this recipe using butter instead of olive oil and topped with plain whipped creme. I will definitely report back! Thanks again for sharing your recipes, I love your blog!

I was looking for a basil chocolate recipe… but this sounds intriguing! Do you think basil could be substituted for thyme and it’d still be yummy? Or should I just use thyme? (If I end up using basil, I’ll let you know how it turns out.)

I just made these for my uncle, who is a gourmet chef, and he loved them! (and so did everyone else) He was blown away by the flavor combos and loved the balsamic whipped cream. I will definatley make these again, however, due to the dense and dry nature of the finished cake, i’m going to try making them as mini cupcakes I think, to equalize out the cake to cream ratio a bit (make sense?) I’ll let you know how that works. He took your website down as well. He does a lot of high end banquets and dinners for the hospital he works at, and really wants to give some of your recipes a try. Thanks again!!

I made these a few months ago for someone’s birthday and fell in love. This week I decided to tamper with it and made a strawberry basil version which was also fantastic. THANK YOU for introducing me to balsamic whipped cream.

These sound amazing… and I’m going to try them as a cake-pop! Since finding how much fun I have with my babycakes pop maker, I’m always looking for good savory cupcake recipes to adapt for cakepops. They’re just such fun to serve as appetizers at happy hour. This sounds like a perfect fit. Will let you know..

I was thinking of making a vegan version of these, but I don’t know the first thing about vegan baking. So far, all I’ve come up with is a vegan icing made from coconut milk fat…but I have a feeling it wouldn’t hold up as long as whipped cream might.

These are delightful! I had to make a couple of tweaks (2 tsp dried thyme and only 1.5 tsp zest) As far as the cake goes, personally, I would reduce the EVOO to maybe a 1/2 C? Or perhaps since I didn’t have fresh herbs or as much zest, it became the dominate flavor. Delicious anyway. The whipped cream is amazing. I only had two cups of cream, but it worked out great. I piled the whipped cream on the cupcakes and still have some left over. Thanks for the tasty and creative recipe!